There are so many different opinions on how to save money when planning travel. I’ve been traveling for over a decade and, in the beginning, it was predominantly for business purposes. Since that time, I travel much more for pleasure and decided that I was going to figure out how to save as much as possible and maximize rewards as much as possible. My passion for savings may not be the best way for everyone, but I encourage you to do your research and adjust my steps to customize your own method.
Step 1: Analyze Your Home Airport
This is the first step, because it’s truly the most important part of travel planning and will have a direct impact on Step 2. Is your home airport a hub for a major carrier? If you’re in the US, your major airlines are going to be either American Airlines, United Airlines, or Delta Airlines. Each airline has hubs in multiple US cities. If your closest airport is a hub, this is going to make air travel a lot easier for you. If your airport is not a hub, you’re going to want to determine where the closest hub is for each major airline. Hubs are important, because the majority of flights have to go through a hub before leaving the US. For instance, our hub is DFW for American Airlines. From DFW, we can fly direct to many international destinations. If we lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, we would have to fly through DFW (or another hub) to get out of the US.
Once you have determined the closest hubs, you should analyze the flight schedules and costs to get to those hubs and choose the one with the lowest cost. Now, determine which major airline is located at that hub. For example, American Airlines has hubs in Charlotte, Chicago-O’Hare, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Los Angeles, New York-JFK, New York-LaGuardia, Philadelphia, Phoenix-Sky Harbor, and Washington-National.
Step 2: Find Your Alliance
Once you have discovered which major airline has the closest and most affordable hub near you, determine which alliance that airline belongs to.
American Airlines – OneWorld
Delta Airlines – SkyTeam
United Airlines – Star Alliance
Airline alliances are crucial to maximizing your travel savings, because they allow you to not only build miles for award vouchers, but reduce your cash cost for airfare as a result of utilizing hubs to reduce flight legs and flight times. Shorter flight durations often equate to lower priced fares during fare sales.
You’ve probably already started perusing the alliance web sites and noticed that there are many member airlines included in each alliance. These airlines are all strategically operating in different regions of the world. What you may not know is that when you book award travel with your domestic carrier identified above, the airline will book you seats on the other member airlines of the same alliance. This allows you to use American miles to get to Madrid or Tokyo via Iberia or Japan Airlines.
Step 3: Sign Up for an Airline Frequent Flyer Account
American Airlines – AAdvantage
Delta Airlines – SkyMiles
United Airlines – MileagePlus
Use the above links to sign up for a free account with the airline that corresponds to your closest hub. Now that you have a frequent flyer miles account, you will be best served only flying that airline whose frequent flyer miles program you are now a member. You will earn a mile for each mile flown on the airline and also miles flown on the other alliance airline members. Do note that miles earned on the other alliance airlines may be reduced to a percentage of the miles flown and may be based on the seat class that you book.
Flying isn’t the only way to earn miles. You can also earn miles by purchasing them through the airline. This isn’t usually beneficial since the cost per mile is higher than what it would cost to purchase a cash fare, but occasionally the airlines have deals to purchase miles,and if you pay attention to emails, you have a chance to purchase discounted miles, which are best used for international travel award vouchers where the destination is difficult to reach or just generally an expensive cash fare.
The best way to earn miles while not flying is simply though every day spending.
Step 4: Choose a Rewards Credit Card
Rewards credit cards are essential to maximizing travel benefits while minimizing the expense of the total cost. Some experts will say that it is essential to have more than one card or that certain cards are better than others. They aren’t wrong and you should certainly explore all the options and determine which card is best for you.
The only card that I carry is the Citi AAdvantage Executive Select World Elite Mastercard. As of March 2019, this card gives us some incredible benefits for flying, such as:
- Admirals Club lounge access for up to 20 people utilizing the 10 authorized users.
- First checked bag free on American domestic and international flights for you and up to 8 companions traveling with you booked on the same itinerary.
- Priority check-in counter assistance.
- Priority boarding.
- Earning 2x miles on American purchases and discounted in-flight purchases.
- A statement credit for Global Entry application fees.
- Travel protection.
The benefits while not flying include:
- Earning 1x mile per dollar spent on all purchases.
- No foreign transaction fee.
- Extended warranty on products purchased with the card.
- Earning 10,000 AAdvantage Elite EQMs after spending $40,000 in a calendar year.
I absolutely love this card and for the $450 annual fee, after just a few trips it seriously pays for itself with the free checked luggage alone. When you consider $25 per bag, per person each way, that’s $100 for both of us each trip in checked luggage savings. Utilizing the AAdvantage credit card, we earn enough miles for two international round trip flights every year. That could be a savings of over $5,000 in airfare simply using the card to pay for the purchases we make everyday.
The reasons why I carry a card that earns airline miles as opposed to points are that we live in an American Airlines hub city and only fly American and OneWorld carriers and I have an additional rewards program just for hotels.
Step 5: Airfare Deals
Now that you have your preferred airline and frequent flyer miles, you may be wondering how to find deals on airfare. There are a couple of methods I really like for discounted airfare. The first is doing nothing. Yes, you read that correctly. The best method is letting the deals come to you rather than looking for them. For this, I suggest that everyone sign up for Scott’s Cheap Flights. Scott’s is an email service that sends daily (sometimes multiple times a day) deals right to your email inbox. The deals are separated by city and airline. Not signing up for Scott’s would be the biggest travel mistake you can make.
The second method takes more work, because you actively have to search flights. Search engines such as Google Flights or Momondo. Both sites have price graph widgets so you can determine the cheapest days to depart and return. Both sites also have suggestions for destinations that airlines happen to be offering deals to. Momondo offers a bonus in its mobile app, which contains a world map with all the airports pinned. The best part is that the pins contain the lowest priced fares to the destination for dates when the fares are most affordable. It might be obvious at this point that the second method requires flexibility. Some of the lowest fares happen to be departing in days or weeks. That’s kind of the downside, but you get to save money, and who dislikes saving money? Finally, the caveat with Momondo is that you have to be sure to avoid purchasing from shady vendors. If you haven’t heard of the vendor, it’s probably best to ignore it and spend a few dollars more to buy from a reputable vendor.
Step 6: Choose a Hotel Rewards Program
Some people are loyal to Hilton or Marriott brands, but with all our travels, we find that it’s impossible to stay in remote places if you remain loyal to hotel brands. While, we are Hilton HHonors members, we have a much more preferable way of booking our lodging—Hotels.com. I absolutely love Hotels.com for the reasons I will discuss in this section.
The best feature of Hotels.com is that you book your Hiltons and Marriotts and still get rewards for them through their respective programs. You can also get a lot of the smaller hotel chains and independent hotels. We have not found a location where there was not an adequate available hotel on Hotels.com. Hotels.com also offers a cancellation policy for many of the available bookings. Using this feature, you can cancel the booking at a hotel without incurring any monetary loss. The site also has even deeper discounts on bookings that don’t offer cancellation. This is perfect for bookings that you know you will definitely need if they are a few days out. Hotels.com also offers a price match guarantee, which applies to rates on other sites or if the Hotels.com rate decreases after the booking.
At this point you’re probably not sold and asking where the rewards are. But, there’s more. You can sign up for a free Hotel.com Rewards account, which will get you a credit for a free night for every 10 nights stayed. Hotels.com uses the average rate of the 10 nights to calculate the credit for the free night. If you travel a lot, you will hit either Silver or Gold status, which entitles you to special pricing. You will also want to use the Hotel.com mobile app, because the app has special pricing and occasional discount codes. The amount of money we have saved using Hotels.com over the years is staggering, and it’s not solely due to the Rewards program.
Step 7: Cash Back Affiliate Click Thru Sites
Not only can you get the Hotels.com Rewards and the savings on bookings, but if you go through an affiliate click thru site, you can save even more money. Affiliate click thru sites are websites that track the site traffic. The affiliate site gets paid from the vendor and passes on a portion of that to you.
We use Mrrebates.com. With MrRebates, Hotels.com gives you a 5% cash back rebate on your bookings after you stay. MrRebates will either send you a check or make a deposit into your PayPal account 90 days after your hotel stay. MrRebates works for a lot of other sites we use also, like ebags.com, which is where we purchase our suitcases, backpacks, overnight bags, etc.
I hope that you have found this post informative to provide you some ideas and thoughts about saving money on travel. Feel free to send us a message and let us know if this helped.
